American Literature: Between Natural His

“Reduce Your Footprint.” “Ditch The Past.” “Leave No Trace.” Calling for coexistent habitats, environmentalist discourses strive to decenter the human, and focus on the future. This class will not dispute the crucial need to reconsider how humans must interact with the Earth through mutually fortifying and thus lasting relationships. Instead, we will take a historicist approach to descriptions and discussions of people and the environment, to explore how nature writing has negotiated the absence or erasure of humans through its varied and vexed phases from 1492 to the nineteenth century.

Through a range of literary forms, we will study how mainly Anglophone writers in the early Americas managed the representation of humans in nature. We will begin with the literature of Natural History from European colonialism in the Caribbean, and ask after the ways in which this archive strives to establish authority at the expense of representing Indigenous and Black guides, informants, and enslaved laborers. We will compare these descriptions then, to those developed in nineteenth century nature writing from U.S. American Transcendentalists, and analyze the ways in which this cohort of writers assesses and often celebrates nature as a place to escape to or lose oneself within. Finally, we will end by reading U.S. American slave narratives that complicate this Transcendentalist injunction to be philosophically absorbed by nature, and that re-envision nature’s role in the arc of fugitivity to freedom. On the one hand, we will map rhetorical or narratological techniques, literary forms, and racialized and gendered voices within these various representations of the natural world. On the other hand, we will consider the natural world as itself a narrative, that is, a produced story dependent on organizing space and situating peoples. In considering the generic variations and evolution of nature writing, our discussions will be framed by questions about where and how nature writing appears, who or what nature writing makes present or absent, who or what this writing cultivates or erases, by what means, and to what ends.

As we wend through these entangled literary representations of nature and people, we will also explore cartographic representations of environments and colonial space, through weekly exercises in ‘reading’ actual maps. We will further attempt to translate the practice of nonlinear reading spurred by cartographic analysis, back to our literary a